The world's languages contain about 869 phonemes comprised of 558 consonants, 260 vowels and 51 diphthongs. American English utilizes 52 phonemes while the Kalahari Desert language !X{umlaut over (υ)} holds the record at 141. Until the age of six to eight months, infants are able to distinguish all 859 phonemes. At about that time, the infant brain begins to sort the phoneme sounds into a much smaller subset based on exposure to its native language. As a single lingual adult, the brain is “tuned” to readily distinguish one phoneme from another in its native language but often fails to do so when exposed to foreign phonemes.
Similarly, from about 6 to 7 months of age, babies begin to babble in early attempts to enunciate native language phonemes. In doing so, babies begin the process of tuning their brain's control over their vocal tracks to support the native language. The brain of a single lingual adult also readily pronounces all native language phonemes but often cannot correctly pronounce foreign phonemes.
Studies indicate that the ability to “tune” the brain to pronounce and distinguish phonemes diminishes after six months of age. By adulthood, many find it nearly impossible to change their tuning to fully support another language. This is reflected in the fact that children have far less difficulty than adults when learning and speaking a second language. Furthermore, this often occurs without native language accents.
If a foreign phoneme is similar but differs slightly from a native phoneme, a tuned brain often fails to readily distinguish or speak the foreign phoneme, instead substituting the native phoneme in the process. An example of this process can be appreciated when a listener who understands only native Japanese hears the American English word “river.” The Japanese listener typically cannot readily distinguish the non-Japanese /ri/ sound from a native /li/ sound and may hear something closer to “liver.” When asked to repeat the word, the Japanese listener having no vocalization training to speak the /ri/ phoneme will also say “liver.”
With intense, repetitive correction, a child's brain may “retune” to distinguish foreign phonemes and adapt to accommodate corresponding vocal track control. Because of the nature of brain development, after eight or ten years of age, foreign language facility is dramatically harder to acquire. Accordingly, attempts to retune an adolescent or adult brain may be quite difficult and may often fail.
With insufficient retuning of a foreign speaker's brain, native listeners may perceive foreign language accents. Such accents themselves may be difficult for the native listener to understand. When the foreign language speaker substitutes a similar foreign phoneme having no direct native counterpart, the native listener's brain may similarly mischaracterize the foreign phoneme. If contextual and grammatical queues fail, the native listener may find the foreign speaker incomprehensible.
Currently, there are nearly 7000 world languages. The top 100 are native to nearly 90% of the world's populace, while the top 10 are spoken by over 50%. Of the top 10 languages, many share a large number of common phonemes. This is especially true when languages share a common origin.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.